


imaginary worlds

by aheadfulloffollies



Category: The Shadowhunter Chronicles - Cassandra Clare
Genre: F/F, Fluff, Ice Sculpting, and also a bit of kissing i guess but like, honestly just some fluff, i'm so bad at tags help ahhhh, irrelevant, just them being adorable, set on wrangel island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:49:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28291914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aheadfulloffollies/pseuds/aheadfulloffollies
Summary: Aline worries that she's holding Helen back, but Helen reassures her that she's right where she wants to be.
Relationships: Helen Blackthorn/Aline Penhallow
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	imaginary worlds

**Author's Note:**

> this one's for my lovely friend shark- surprise ! i'm your secret santa !!!! i really hope you like it <33333
> 
> LONG LIVE THE LESBIANS HELL YEA

It was all at once  the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to imagine a different universe.

On one hand, it was always easy to see a prettier horizon when Aline held Helen’s hand. Everything was a blooming forest with her, something to get lost in, and she reveled in any opportunity to explore its depths. On the other, the imaginary reminded her of everything they didn’t have, everything that had been taken from them.

But she played a game sometimes. When she sculpted Helen out of ice and snow, she drew her as anything. A queen, a witch, a mermaid, stunning and mysterious and beautiful in any form. The imagining helped both of them, but for the most part, Aline did it for Helen. She knew how hard it was for her with all her family in Los Angeles, how hard she took being on Wrangel Island. She hoped that the sculptures might lessen the hurt a little bit- to see herself live out a million impossible dreams, if only as a frozen statue.

Today, she had sculpted her beautiful wife with a crown of flowers, delicate and strong as a tree adorned by the fruits of its labour.

As always, she’d had the urge to sculpt herself next to her, but as always, she’d resisted. Placing herself in the serene picture she created always seemed out of place. Someday, she promised herself. Someday she would join Helen as an eternal figure of warmth sculpted from the cold. But not today.

“Aline.” The familiar voice made her turn, a smile already half grown, shocked out of her vigorous focus to the most welcome sight in the world.

“Hi, darling,” she responded, greeting her wife with a kiss so much like home for a moment she couldn’t even feel the cold around her.

“I’m finishing dinner,” Helen said, wrapping an arm around Aline’s waist. “I tried my best.” A soft half smile curled across her lips, and Aline smiled to herself. In the days after a call with her family, it could be hard to get Helen to smile enough.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” she said. “And if not, I’ll eat it anyway.” She blew out, watching her breath turn visible in front of her for only a second before it disappeared. “You got me right in time. I just finished.”

Helen was already there, admiring the ice sculpture with widened eyes. Aline lost track of time watching her wife’s cheeks and nose turn pink in the cold, smile widening. How had she ever gotten so lucky?

“You keep getting better and better,” she finally breathed out, and Aline nestled closer to her side. “I look better there than I do in real life.” She laughed, and Aline shoved her, shaking her head despite the wide grin she couldn’t help.

“Hey,” Helen whispered after a second, leaning down to speak into Aline’s hair. She loved when Helen did that, and nearly swooned into her arms on the spot. “Why do you never sculpt yourself with me?”

“Well,” she started without thinking much about what might come out of her mouth, “I sculpt you. As a… as a dream. Something you could be if you were given the chance. An escape. You, but… freer.” She paused, wondering for possibly the first time if that was weird. A single glance at Helen, however, quelled her fears of judgment, and she took a deep breath, charging ahead.

“It always feels out of place to put myself in. I want to, but…” This time her pause was genuine, a million fragments of thoughts running through her mind but never enough to form anything concrete enough to make such a thing as a sentence. “I think,” she said after a long moment, “that I… well,  _ we _ , seem too real for those imaginary worlds. Your love for your family, for example, I know is just as strong as yours for me. But I don’t know what it’s like to be on either side of that love. So there’s an aspect of the unknowable that makes it possible for it to stay in a fictional, dream universe and not stain it.

“But with us…” Her hand grasped Helen’s of its own accord, intertwining their fingers. A tangible reminder that they were there and they were real and it was so, so beautiful that they could even exist like this.

“With us, I can feel the way I love you like a real, physical thing in me. And that makes it hard to put it in any sort of perfect dream, because the realest things come with pain, too. And I don’t want you to feel pain,” she whispered. “That’s the whole point. To make a perfect universe, where you’re happy and with your family and able to be yourself.”

There was a certain kind of anxiety that penetrated Aline’s soul whenever she let someone into the deepest parts of her mind, no matter who that person was. Oftentimes, she preferred to run away and stay silent or not wait around for any sort of reaction that might hurt her. But this was Helen, and she loved her ( _ oh, _ she loved her), so she took a deep breath and calmed her mind and tried to be patient.

“This is my perfect world,” she said after just long enough.

Aline blinked at her wife. “We’re on Wrangel Island.”

Helen’s laugh was sharp and short, drawn out of her in surprise, but a twinkle returned to her eye. “Yeah, well. This is it for me. Wrangel Island and all. It’s not great all the time, but it’s  _ good, _ Aline. It really is. And I have you. I know it’s tough sometimes, and I get down as much as anyone, but…” She hesitated, clasping Aline’s hands between them, looking into her eyes like she might drown in them, and Aline always started to think when she stared with such longing that she might let her.

“This is better than any imaginary world. I have you. I’m still me. I’m alive, and we’re trying, and I still get to talk to my family. We’re happy.”

“Well, yeah,” Aline said. “But what would be your  _ dream _ world? The one you would, I don’t know… wish on a star for?”

“This,” Helen said, the world half a laugh of ecstasy, as if this conversation were as serendipitous for her as it was for Aline. “All my imaginary worlds, all the pretty dreams, they all end up being this. I wouldn’t give you up for anything, Aline. Not being a queen or a star or a fucking dragon. Yeah, it’s really fucking cold here and people assume bad things because I’m half-faerie, but look around.”

Aline did, dropping Helen’s hands slowly and turning, trying to soak up everything in a single minute, burning every bit of this perfect moment into her mind so it might stay forever.

Snow shone on the ground almost perfectly untouched like the softest blanket. The sky was a dusky blue-grey, cloudless and clear, a colour that reminded her a bit of Helen’s eyes when she was tired and sad on the worst of days. But it was beautiful, stars beginning to light the expanse where sadness littered Helen’s on those nights. The trees were barren yet strong, a haunted safety lingering between their branches. It was only a backyard, hardly the great outdoors, but there was something raw and breathtaking about it all the same.

“Oh,” she whispered.

“Yeah.” Helen smiled wide, taking Aline’s hand again and using her other arm to wrap it around her waist, leaning her head against the top of Aline’s. “This is my imaginary world,” she said. “And, no offense intended to your brilliant sculpting and beautiful mind, but it’s a million times better than any of the ones you’ve created. Know why?”

Aline twisted in her arms so she faced her, admiring the way Helen’s golden hair fell in slight curls around her face and down her back, how her smile lit up her whole face. “Let me guess. Because I’m here.”

“Yeah.” Helen touched her nose to Aline’s, grin fading into something softer. “Because you’re here.”

Aline lost herself in the kiss, and the worlds that ran through her mind this time weren’t fictional scenes, but a story that was real and theirs. From the first time they met until now, every glorious moment of it.

_ Yeah,  _ she thought.  _ Dreams don’t compare to a beautiful reality. _

A scent of something tainted the moment, and Aline slowly pulled away. Her smile was no doubt goofy and her hair a mess, but she laughed anyway. What was the point of having a wife if she couldn’t be a fool around her?

“Is that dinner burning?” she asked, placing the smell.

Shock, confusion, and then humor passed over Helen’s face in tandem, and she rushed back inside, shouting behind her as Aline’s laughter turned raucous. “Shut  _ up,  _ Aline.”

“It’s okay!” she chirped back, barely containing the last dregs of her laughter. “I think we still have some peanut butter.”

“I hate you.”

“I love you too.”


End file.
